Expertise

Biography

Dr. Michael Dettinger is a research hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Western Regional Research, and a research associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who researchs the hydrology, climate, and water resources of the West, focusing on regional surface water and groundwater resources, hydroclimatic variability, and climate-change impacts.

Dr. Michael Dettinger is a research hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Western Regional Research, and a research associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California. Dettinger has researched the hydrology, climate, and water resources of the West for over 30 years, focusing on regional surface water and groundwater resources and modeling, hydroclimatic variability, and climate-change impacts. He was physical-sciences team leader for DOI-DOD ecosystem planning in the Mojave Desert, founding member of the CIRMONT Western Mountain Climate Sciences Consortium, climate advisor to the CALFED Bay-Delta Restoration Program, research advisor for USGS Surface-Water Discipline, member of the USGS Global Change Science Strategic Planning Team, and lead author of the Water Resources chapter of the 2013 National Climate Assessment. Dettinger has degrees from the University of California, San Diego (Physics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Civil Engineering/Water Resources), and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (Atmospheric Sciences). He has authored and co-authored 90+ scientific articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books, 20+ government reports, and 70+ other articles in less formal outlets.

Dettinger, Michael, 2005. Changes in streamflow timing in the western United States in recent decades... from the National Streamflow Information Program. Geological Survey (U.S.) Fact Sheet 2005-3018, 4 p. [Link]

McCabe, G.J., and Dettinger, M.D., 2002, Primary modes and predictability of year-to-year snowpack variations in the western United States from teleconnections with Pacific Ocean climate: Journal of Hydrometeorology, 3, 13-25.

Cayan, D.R., Kammerdiener, S., Dettinger, M.D., Caprio, J.M., and Peterson, D.H., 2001, Changes in the onset of spring in the western United States: Bulletin, American Meteorological Society, 82, 399-415.

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) have a significant role in generating floods across the western United States. We analyze daily streamflow for water years 1949 to 2015 from 5,477 gages in relation to water vapor transport by ARs using a 6 h chronology resolved to 2.5° latitude and longitude. The probability that an AR will generate 50 mm/d of...

Recent advances in atmospheric sciences and hydrology have identified the key role of atmo-spheric rivers (ARs) in determining the distribution of strong precipitation events in the midlatitudes. The growth of the subject is evident in the increase in scientific publications that discuss ARs (Fig. 1a). Combined with related phenomena, that is,...

In this study, the scenarios ultimately take the form of gridded, daily (maximum and minimum) temperatures and precipitation totals spanning the entire Truckee-Carson River System, from which meteorological inputs to various hydrologic, water-balance and watermanagement models can be extracted by other parts of the Water for the Seasons project...

Gridded hourly precipitation observations over the conterminous U.S., from 1948 to 2002, are analyzed to determine climatological characteristics of storm precipitation totals. Despite generally lower hourly intensities, precipitation totals along the U.S. West Coast (USWC) are comparable to those in southeast U.S. (SEUS). Storm durations, more so...

In the southwestern U.S., the meteorological phenomenon known as atmospheric rivers (ARs) has gained increasing attention due to its strong connections to floods, snowpacks, and water supplies in the West Coast states. Relatively less is known about the ecological implications of ARs, particularly in the interior Southwest, where AR storms are...

On 12 February, water resource managers at the Oroville Dam issued an evacuation warning that forced some 180,000 Californians to relocate to higher ground. The story of how conditions got to this point involves several factors, but two clearly stand out: the need to prevent water shortages during a record drought, followed by one of the wettest...

This report describes the preliminary viability assessment (PVA) of forecast informed reservoir operations (FIRO) for Lake Mendocino, which is located on the East Fork Russian River three miles east of Ukiah, California. The results described in this report represent the collective activities of the Lake Mendocino FIRO Steering Committee (SC) (SC...

The State of Bay–Delta Science 2008 highlighted seven emerging perspectives on science and management of the Delta. These perspectives had important effects on policy and legislation concerning management of the Delta ecosystem and water exports. From the collection of papers that make up the State of Bay–Delta Science 2016, we derive another...

Regions of complex topography and remote wilderness terrain have spatially varying patterns of temperature and streamflow, but due to inherent difficulties of access, are often very poorly sampled. Here we present a data set of distributed stream stage, streamflow, stream temperature, barometric pressure, and air temperature from the Tuolumne...

California’s vast reservoir system, fed by annual snow-and rainfall, plays an important part in providing water to the State’s human and wildlife population. There are almost 1,300 reservoirs throughout the State, but only approximately 200 of them are considered storage reservoirs, and many of the larger ones are critical components of the...

Using water column temperature records collected since 1968, we analyzed the impacts of climate change on thermal properties, stability intensity, length of stratification, and deep mixing dynamics of Lake Tahoe using a modified stability index (SI). This new SI is easier to produce and is a more informative measure of deep lake stability than...